thinking rocks (object-oriented ontology)

[northrop_fried]

In my field-- medieval literary studies-- there's this trendy thing, Object-oriented ontology"The rejection of post-Kantian privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Beginning with Kant's "Copernican revolution," modern philosophers began articulating a transcendental anthropocentrism, whereby objects are said to

Comments

[poldyb]

Oh, I thought we just gave each other books here. So we are gonna talk about stuff now?

"objects exist independently of human perception" Did Kant deny this?

"nonhuman object relations distort their relata in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness."
Is this supposed to be true even for non-conscious objects? Seems both weird and pointless.

[max_ambiguity]

I think I have encountered OOO in my research but struggled with what they were doing with it in philosophy. Here, it sounds like an effort to be less self-centered and acknowledge that there are relationships and exchanges that exist independently of human perception or even human beings.

But I could be wrong, and I don't know why you, specifically, should care.

[northrop_fried]

Well, I'm working on group formation and identity in the Middle Ages right now through letter-writing manuals, so I'm finding Bruno Latour to be stimulating reading, though I'm not really sure whether it's going to be important enough to get explicit mention. I like--and am still making sense of-- how Latour decribes (however obliquely he gets at it) the relationship between objective social structures and specific interactions. But this OOO/"vibrant materialism" is baffling, or possibly, as Poldy puts it, "strange and pointless." Nevertheless there's this noisy and visible clique of medievalists who are going on about this stuff, and I just wanted to see if any of the theoryheads here could de-baffle it.

[a_priori]

This sounds like what one of those needlessly dressed up Bold Revisions of Ontology that turns out to be either (a) trivially true, or (b) unbelievably silly.

Excepting dear old Bishop Berkeley and his intellectual progeny, philosophers do not deny that plenty of objects and relations among objects exist independently of our cognition concerning these objects. What most philosophers deny is that we can have knowledge of these objects and their relations independent of our cognition concerning them

[northrop_fried]

I appreciate your input. I'm virtually philosophically illiterate, so I hoped someone in the group could put this in perspective.

It reminds me of Romantic transcendentalism, but I really don't understand what critical purchase it gives people trying to understand human social and cultural practices.